Back To The Past

Part Three: Stealing The Past

"Uh, Doc, where are we?" asked Marty as he stared out the windows of the locomotive, marveling at the blue energy swirling about them. "Why haven't we, uh, arrived yet?"

"Clara, and I, have made a lot of discoveries in the last year, Marty," answered the Doc, not answering Marty's question at all.

"It's only been a year for you! Doc, why? Well, I know why, what I mean is, why did you wait so long to come back?"

"When I found out what had happened, the time-line was already beginning to alter. My only chance was to out distance the temporal wave at some point in the future."

"Okay, I think I understand that. I don't know why, but I do. That still doesn't tell me where we are."

"We're in the time-stream," revealed the Doc, looking at Marty as if he expected some startling reaction.

"You've lost me now, Doc. Shouldn't we have gone from one time to another?"

"We are, Marty. We are," exclaimed Doc Brown, turning to check over one of the multiple control panels. "We're just taking a little longer to do it than what you're used to."

"Used to? Doc, it's been eighteen years! I'm not used to any of this."

Marty felt a tinge of guilt as he saw the Doc's shoulders slump, the man appearing to shrink a little at Marty's berating. When he turned around, he looked at Marty with eyes that were both sad and tired.

Extremely tired.

"I'm sorry, Marty," said the Doc, his voice almost hushed. "I some times forget about those passing normally through time. Look at you, you're all grown up now."

"Yeah, I am grown up, Doc. Jennifer and I are married, we've got two kids. A house. A dog."

"Are you happy, Marty?"

"You know, Doc, I kept asking myself that same question. I guess I didn't realize it, but yeah, I'm happy."

"Then we've both got something worth fighting for, Marty," said the Doc, his voice returning to normal. "Biff's stolen my family, and your future."

"What happened?"

Doc pressed a button on a side panel, and parts of the floor began to bubble, rising up liquid-like, shifting into the form of two chairs. Doc dropped down into one of the chairs and motioned for Marty to take the other.

"Another product of the future," informed the Doc. "Twenty-one ten, if I remember right."

"Cool," said Marty, surprised to find the chair extremely comfortable.

"I would hazard the thought that this is all my fault," started the Doc, beginning his story of how things had gone wrong. "I had assumed that the secret of time travel would be sealed with the destruction of the DeLorean, but I was wrong."

"Biff stole your plans?"

"No, nothing so mundane. He saw your return from eighteen eighty-five, on the railroad tracks. He saw the destruction of the DeLorean, and he saw my return to say good bye. He saw it all."

"I don't understand, Doc. So he saw it, so what?"

"We left all of the pieces there, Marty. Every bit of metal, every nut and bolt, every computer chip. Everything that was the DeLorean, and the Flux Capacitor."

Marty's mouth dropped open as he realized what the Doc was saying.

"Biff has spent the last eighteen years rebuilding it," confirmed Doc Brown, nodding solemnly.

"But it was destroyed," argued Marty. "Completely destroyed. How could…. I mean…. I didn't know he was that good with cars."

"He wasn't. Or, at least he wouldn't have been, if we hadn't gone back to nineteen fifty-five a second time."

"Nineteen fifty-five? What did we do in nineteen fifty-five?"

"When Biff wrecked his car for the second time, he didn't have the money to get it fixed, he had to do it himself. That's when he got interested in working on cars."

"Damn, Doc. It seems that no matter what we do, we always cause something else to happen."

"I know, Marty, I know. Anyhow, two weeks from your time, Biff takes the rebuilt DeLorean on a test drive into the future. When he realizes what it does, he goes back and it gives it to his younger self."

"His younger self?" wondered Marty. "But, Doc, he was at my party."

"The temporal wave hadn't caught up with your existence yet. I have no idea what your time, or the rest of the future, even looks like now. Not since young Biff's crime spree."

"Crime spree? Come on, Doc. I know Biff's and asshole, but a criminal?"

"Are you forgetting Mad Dog?" prodded Doc Brown. "The Biff of our alternate nineteen eighty-five killed your father, and tried to kill you. And what about Griff?"

"Point made, Doc," conceded Marty, nodding.

"The Tannen line is tainted, Marty. There can be no other explanation."

"I get it, Doc, I get it. So Biff rebuilt the DeLorean, went back in time, gave it to his younger self, who went on some sort of a crime spree…." enticed Marty, wanting the Doc to finish his story.

"Crime spree, right," picked up Doc Brown. "Young Biff went through time, stealing priceless works of art, before they became priceless! I don't know how he figured it out, but he had the foresight to hide the objects where he could recover them in his normal time."

"I don't understand, Doc. Why didn't he just bring them back with him?"

"Because they wouldn't have aged, Marty. How can you sell the portrait of the Mona Lisa when it proves to be only a year old? He had to let them age, to keep their value."

"I don't think Biff's that smart, Doc," chided Marty.

"He rebuilt the DeLorean, didn't he? Besides, it doesn't matter. What's done is done, unless we see that it's never done."

"I'm getting a headache here, Doc," groaned Marty, rubbing his temples.

"When I tried to confront Biff, back in ninety fifty-five, his older self showed up, with his goon squad, and kidnapped Clara and the kids. His men were supposed to abandon me in the medieval period and return with the locomotive, but it seems that no matter what time-line we're in, those guys aren't too smart."

"You left his boys in medieval times?"

"Don't worry, they don't know enough to be burned as witches. Besides, if my plan works, then they'll never have gone back."

"What is the plan, Doc?"

"We're going back to the past, to nineteen eighty-five, and steal the wreckage of the DeLorean back from Biff. We'll be arriving at night, and we'll hide the train in the high school stadium."

"Sounds easy enough."

"We have to be extremely careful, Marty. You said yourself that you've been happy all these years. We can't risk you meeting your past self and somehow changing that."

"Okay, Doc," agreed Marty.

"We'll be dropping from the time stream in…" he looked over to a small chronometer built into the front panel, "…one minute."

Despite the warmth of the compartment, Biff couldn't stop shivering, his body trembling as if he was racked with spasms. He had thought he was going to die as they slipped into the time-stream, the same time-stream that he had hoped to travel through in a couple weeks, and he probably would have if his hand hadn't brushed across the latch of a storage compartment on the side of train.

It had taken all of his strength, fighting against the temporal forces buffeting him, but Biff had managed to get the compartment door open and cram himself into it, before it was too late.

There was a second door, on the inside of the compartment, which opened into something resembling an engine room. Biff had thought about slipping into the interior of the train, but he knew that he was in no shape to confront Doc Brown or Marty should they discover him. No, the safest thing to do was to remain in the cramped storage compartment, waiting for them to arrive wherever it was that they were going.

He just hoped it was someplace warm.

To Be Continued…